Gilded Goldbergs - Part 2

As Part of Piano Season on the BBC, Robin Holloway's Gilded Goldbergs are given a rare live performance by Huw Watkins and Ashley Wass in the atmospheric setting of one of Devon's most beautiful churches.

Robin Holloway's haunting, scintillating one hundred minute two-piano Odyssey begins and ends with simple transcription and opens out in ever-widening curves of exploration as the composer pays homage not just to JS Bach, "with his foundations in mighty structure and his head in the starry heavens," but to Robin Holloway's many musical friends, "pictured within." The result is a virtual encyclopaedia of twentieth-century musical practice, a tribute to modernism (and romanticism) as much as to Bach, embracing an emotional range from melancholic introspection to crashing triumph, extending en route to satire, burlesque and post-modern "poly-stylism." Yet because every variation is dedicated to a friend "pictured within" - including pianist-composer, Huw Watkins - the whole breathtaking enterprise is infused with the tender warmth of an intimate form of domestic music-making which Bach himself would have recognised.